Discover Magazine Blogs

FYI, Bargh (the author of this editorial) has been pushing these sorts of priming effects for a long time. Many of these (most famously the "priming people with elderly-related words makes them walk slower" study) have not held up under subsequent replications.

Clearly this doesn't mean that the studies Bargh is describing here are similarly flawed – but he has shown a strong resistance to admitting his mistakes, and so I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here, particularly when the original studies aren't linked anywhere.

Further reading:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/18/primed-by-expectations-why-a-classic-psychology-experiment-isnt-what-it-seemed/

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate-just-fine-thanks/

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/

I disagree. It is a useful perspective because it flies in the face of one's intuited perspective. How many of us would have estimated that the volume of water would be so small? We visualize the oceans as really deep gouges on the Earth's surface because to our puny asses a depth of 1 to 8 miles sounds amazingly deep. We'd never guess that even with miles deep depressions and miles high mountains, the Earth is smoother than a billiard ball:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth/

Combining both of these counter-intuitive perspectives tells us that our oceans are akin to a very thin film of water on a wet billiard ball. A thin dirty film is all that billions of bacteria needs to thrive on a billiard ball, and a thin dirty film is all that billions of animals and plants need to thrive on Earth.

I would guess that the word Delicate isn't really the case, more "fine tuned". They say the volcanos are about a mile deep, so based on this calculator - http://www.calctool.org/CALC/other/games/depth_press , thats about 2360PSI. I am not a physicist, but it seems that if that pressure were to decrease because of a greater pull on the water from the Sun, then it would be less able to "contain" the magma underneath. unfortunately, I don't know what the actual deviation in pressure down there might be with the fluctuations of the earth's tides.

This also reminds me of this - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/10/01/antarctic-ice-melt-changing-earths-gravity/

If the icecaps melt, and the water migrates into the oceans, then the pressure on the seafloor increases by some amount, which might further decrease seafloor volcanism?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/04/higgs/

This is a great comment:
"Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re at the target range, and the Lone Ranger is shooting at clay pidgins right nearby. Obviously you’ll want to know if he’s shooting silver bullets, right? But you can’t look at them while they’re still tied up in the gun. You can’t look at them after they’ve hit the pidgin. And they’re traveling too fast to study while they’re in flight. The only way you can see if they’re silver bullets is based on how the pidgin gets blown to pieces."

"The Higgs boson has a very short lifetime outside of other subatomic particles. The only way for us to study them is to smash those particles together and see the results of the decay. Based on how the Higgs decays (blows itself to pieces), we can infer its existence."

I don't know you, and I can't comment on Colombia, as I have never experienced it. Of course, I can enjoy life without that possibly hazardous trip. I'm only suggesting to you that there are non-governmentally approved,very worthwhile, and perfectly healthy experiences that you are missing out on, as I have chosen to pass on Colombia.

Each to his own. I enjoy your posts enormously. Maybe some day you will have a change of heart and post about a life changing mushroom trip one day. Stay loose!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/10/03/drug-in-magic-mushrooms-linked-to-long-lasting-personality-change-for-the-better/

Agriculture can support higher population density. If you've got mouths to feed, you do the hard work. There is a hypothesis that the cold Younger Dryas period around 12,000 years ago pushed people in the fertile crescent into cereal cultivation, since the colder temperatures meant less available food for hunter-gatherer populations that had grown during the warmer period preceding it.

The first farmers were significantly less healthy than the hunter-gatherers they followed [1].

[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-farmers-were-sicker-and-shorter-than-their-forager-ancestors/